[ASTRILL] OK, for those of you having Astrill problems

VPN
1

14/02/27 10am
EDIT: ASTRILL IS CURRENTLY DOWN. AS IN DOWN. API PROBLEMS, APPARENTLY. THIS THREAD WON’T HELP YOU RIGHT NOW. FEEL FREE TO COMPLAIN BELOW. I’LL EDIT THE SUBREDDIT HEADER WHEN IT’S BACK UP, WHICH HOPEFULLY WON’T BE TOO LONG.

So I know that Astrill has been a bit wank over the last couple of weeks. I’ve personally been using Astrill for around 3 years now and occasionally the performance has been a little poor whenever China decide to stick a few extra bricks on top of the Great Firewall. However, every time in the past 3 years, Astrill have come up with a fix that returns normal service within a week at the longest. The longest 100% downtime I’ve had with Astrill (i.e. can’t log in or connect to any servers) is still less than 24 hours.

I have no personal affiliation with Astrill - the reason I give out invites is because it’s a product that I have used pretty much every single day in the past 3 years and have had by far the best experience with out of all the VPN solutions I’ve used since moving to China. Yes, I get a free month if you sign up from my invitation (which I tell you when I send the invite), but to be honest that free month is next to worthless to me since it doesn’t come with the Family Plan or StealthVPN options, which I use daily and without which Astrill is pretty useless to me. 90% of people who get the week’s trial from me don’t sign up anyway - usually they’re only in town for a short time and just want a way to access Facebook.

I just had a good conversation with Astrill customer support (you can read it here in full in case you care), and figured I would post this here to try to help out with some of the problems people are having.

Before I say anything else: PLEASE DO NOT MAKE THREADS ABOUT ASTRILL PROBLEMS HERE. This isn’t Astrill support. This is Astrill support. They’ve got live chat, email, Skype, telephone, and support tickets. Lots of ways for you to get in touch. Their live chat support is 24/7. Their site works without a VPN. Nobody on /r/shanghai works for Astrill. We can tell you if we’re also having issues, but that’s not going to help fix anything. If you have problems with Astrill, talk to Astrill.

I only know any of what I’m about to type from talking to their live chat support (which I know people tend to complain about, but I’ve always had great service from them).

Windows

  • Go to Astrill’s download page and grab the latest installer package, and install it. You probably have version 2.9 already, but the one on the website is the latest build, and according to Astrill will definitely improve performance. Astrill usually updates automatically but it seems that the latest auto update wasn’t rolled out to everyone.

  • Personally I’ve had much better experience on American and European servers than any of the Asian servers. Las Vegas, Fremont, Seattle, Dallas, and West Coast are my go-to USA servers. For Europe, Denmark, Sweden, and Luxembourg. In general, I’ve found all the Hong Kong, Taiwan, Korea, and Japan servers to be slow as shit and twice as ugly. Don’t know why. Using the US/European servers on my home connection I get around 1500-2000 kB/s on YouTube.

    (edit: sohois reports good performance on Vietnam server)

  • OpenWeb mode basically just reroutes your HTTP traffic through Astrill - that is, anything that goes through your browser. However, StealthVPN reroutes your entire connection (including Steam, games, and any other non web-based applications). It’s also a lot more stable and generally will give better speeds. I haven’t used OpenWeb since it went to shit a while back, but it might be all right again now. I believe StealthVPN is still an optional extra, but personally I feel like it’s worth it for the stability.

  • Don’t complain about bad ping if you’re trying to play online games with your buddies back in the US, or whatever. You’re going to get shitty ping if you’re playing with somebody outside of China even without a VPN since everything is bottlenecked by the GFW. Playing with a VPN is going to be much worse since your connection is being rerouted all over the place. The only solution to shitty ping is to play games with other people in China.

Android

  • Get the Astrill app. It came out about a month ago but there was little pomp surrounding the occasion, so a lot of people still don’t know about it. It’s very simple and a FAR better alternative to using Android’s own VPN configuration. For one, it will reconnect to a server if the connection is lost. Secondly, it uses a variant of the StealthVPN protocol, which is consistently better than what is available without the app (generally manual configuration using L2TP/IPSec). Thirdly, it allows you to use a VPN without having to up your device’s security to pattern unlock and above.

  • For those of you with Android phones bought in China without access to the Google Play store (you should really sort that out), here’s an APK you can download that I compiled with APKsaver. Copy the file to your phone and open it with any file explorer app (you’ll need to enable third party/unknown sources in Settings > Security).

  • If you’re still getting crappy performance with the app, go to Settings > StealthVPN options and change the mode from UDP to TCP (port 443). TCP is more reliable but you won’t get as high top speeds. Still, it’s more than enough for me to stream 1080p YouTube videos on my tablet, so it’s good enough for me.

MacOS/iPhone

  • It just works, right?

Sorry, contact Astrill support yourself. If you want to be helpful, post your results/tips here and I’ll update this thread.

OK, that’s my good deed for the day, never say I’m not helpful. Feel free to comment if you have your own tips/advice. If none of this helps or you have specific problems, CONTACT ASTRILL SUPPORT.

2

YES ANDROID APP!!!

I got bored checking ever week a couple of months ago. also good to know they have updated builds that don’t change the version number. Upgrading and downloading now…

Thanks for posting. i’ve had 50% good experience with astrill support and 50% bad. but they are 100% better than any other vpn service i have tried in regards to reliability, service and speed.

3

I wondered why I was having more issues than usual. Just assumed it was shitty internet on my end rather than Astrill.

One point, whilst in I agree in general about US/EU servers being better than the Asian servers, I personally have always had very good connections with the Vietnam server

4

I have chatted with their customer support a handful of times and i gotta say, they are pretty darn nice. Big ups on the thread.

5

Great post kinggimped, I was beginning to wonder how come everything had gotten so slow. Did not really put two and two together about the Asian vs US/Euro servers, but I had actually noticed that. Kudos man, plenty of good solutions here! :slight_smile:

6

a bit wonky is a slight understatement, no? I noticed that open vpn is basically unusable both at home and in my office and open web, which is terribly insecure, works more or less like usual. I don’t know about you but this seems too convenient to me and I won’t do banking over it. they have also never fixed my main gripe, which is the sucky maximum download speed. the best I ever get is bursts of 330kb/s, which means I cannot stream i.e. the daily show, which has removed it’s low quality stream. astrill claims this is due to the great firewall but I have had the exact same speeds in japan, singapore, hong kong and vietnam, which just infuriates me. speed in particular is something they should finally fix. god knows the other two vpns I use are able to address this issue.

and no, mac os / iphone doesn’t just work. it’s a mess trying to find a server that will let me log in on china unicornhole. I wished it was working better but sometimes I’ll try six different servers until I can finally log in. not ideal.

7

I think Astrill is down forever.

8

Someone updated Instagram w a screenshot saying OpenWeb is back up as of 730 pm and everything else should be restored within 24 h.

9

Thanks for the updates random moderator friend Kinggimped, you are an information beacon, floating in a sea of useless noise. I suspect that you have a larger than average phallus.

10

OSX and iPhone checking in… it just works. No issues.

11

There is also /r/vpn for all your VPN-related discussion needs.

12

My fiance and I have been using HideMyAss VPN for over 2 years with pretty good results. It has had its issues when the GFW goes hardass, but in general performs well. Just like your experience with Astrill, HMA seems to perform better on the US/EU servers than any of the Asian servers. Sometimes Taiwan or Singapore can be OK, but typically in the evenings they go to sh*t (perhaps because so many other users at that time?). He uses the VPN all the time, I only use it the once or twice a year that I’m in China (but typically for a month or more at the time). We like HMA because their standard plan allows two simultaneous connections, so when I’m in China, both he and I can be online at the same time.

13

woke up this morning and it said that something about my astrill was terminated due to using it on multiple computers. Please tell me this is part of the maintenance issue because i only have on computer and unless i’ve been “hacked”, there’s no way i gave away any of my VPN info. Did anyone else have this problem??

14

What’s a good alternative to Astrill?

15

Just one question to everyone, I updated my Astrill yesterday, and everytime I connect from my computer it gives me a #101 error saying password or username are invalid. Gotta re-enter the password and then it works. Anyone else has this?

16

Weird, I was using it on the loo about an hour ago on my tablet. It was actually working really well (>2 mB/sec), I thought they might have turned a corner. OpenWeb only or all protocols?

Either way, thanks for letting me know. I’ll put an announcement up in the header. Good on you for being so helpful.

[Edit: Why edit out the snark? It’s not like we’re not used to it by now.]

17

just noticed that there. frustrating.

18

[edit 2:] Update: Astrill has been posting on Twitter for the last 8 hours . I connected via an old Lahana Node I forgot I had set up.

Most troubling is that this is out of their control…

Not really site maintenance, either…

Do they give any more information as to the cause? Another DDOS? It’s no mystery that there are certain parties who have a vested interest in crippling/disabling China’s most popular VPN service…

I think the ‘maintenance’ message on their site is the default message that it reverts to if the web server is down. Either that or it’s simply regurgitating the previous message that was used, so I don’t think it was an attempt to hoodwink their users by claiming it’s maintenance when it’s something else.

The fact that it is out of their control is certainly concerning. I wonder if the dramatically inferior performance lately is related. Perhaps they’ve been under fire for a while and they couldn’t take the strain any more.

19

Mine was working OK this morning, then suddenly toggled itself off and said that I was logged into multiple devices (I never installed Astrill on anything other than my laptop). I quit Astrill, restarted my computer, tried to log back in, it wouldn’t let me, and it’s been giving me #800 errors every time I’ve attempted to log in since.

I sent an email to support, but they haven’t responded (typical, and I guess they’re just inundated with emails like mine). It’s not the worst thing in the world (I can get TV and movies through Chinese sites and GMail works fine albeit slow, and I can still get Reddit and Tumblr, so I won’t want for entertainment), but ugh, I plunked down a year’s subscription and I don’t know how I can get an alternative VPN in China.

20

They tend to get a lot of flak on /r/china, but then I’m trying to think of one single thing that doesn’t get ripped to fucking shreds there.

Personally I’ve always had a good experience with their live support, but to be honest the thing I should really be praising is that I’ve only had to contact them 2 or 3 times in the last 3 years.